#what is investment banking

[shaker917516]

Discover what investment banking entails and its significance in the financial world. Explore the functions, roles, and processes involved in investment banking, from underwriting securities to advising on mergers and acquisitions. Learn about the key players in the industry, including investment banks, financial institutions, and corporations. Gain insights into the diverse career opportunities available in this dynamic field. Whether you're a finance enthusiast or considering a career in investment banking, this guide provides valuable insights into 'what is investment banking' and its pivotal role in global finance. Dive deep into the world of investment banking and unlock the secrets behind this critical aspect of the financial market.

[elsa16744]

Demystifying the Financial Landscape: Unveiling the Crucial Role of Investment Bankers

Curious about the world of finance? Dive into our comprehensive guide to understand the essential "Role of Investment Bankers." Explore their dynamic responsibilities, intricate financial strategies, and how they play a pivotal part in driving economic growth. Unlock insights into the financial realm today.

[marvey-sideblog]

"And it just happened to be empty?" "Something like that."

Suits 4x8 "Exposure" Mike returns to Pearson Specter and gets Harvey's old office.

[daddy-socrates]

sometimes i forget that i started this blog to be about philosophy. anyway i've already told all my group chats so here's one for the blog: just got off a video call w the admissions director at my tied-for-first-choice university and i cannot tell if he thinks i have a shot or if im too much of a loser for their very cool program.

he did give me the very good advice to email faculty i want to work with to introduce myself and get to know them and their work, so maybe that's indicative of . good rapport idk

off to write emails and hope professors deign to respond. please i want to keep doing epistemology. what does it matter

[pigeonstab]

Lovely how paypal keeps suspending the money people have sent for commissions. Literally why.

[live-taser]

I’m undead wdym I still have to do taxes and pay off my loans 😒😒⚡️⚡️

[eolande]

pleaaaaase messmer so soon please pleaaaaaaaase. pull thru. For Cheren. you have to

thanks random harpsichord cover of leonard cohen song of isaac with slightly different lyrics than the original

[theinfinitedivides]

i go from being rendered incoherent at the sheer amount of everything contained in the first ten minutes of ep 8 ('let me go. let me go, you bastard—' 'Kwang Il-ah!' 78 dead 634 injured two fingers lost to gunfire Oscars offered up on a silver platter. local gay mourns the lack of braincells to fully flesh this f*cked up relationship out in a 25k+ fic as it deserves) to losing my sh*t at the thirty minute mark over whatever the f*ck Yoon just tried in order to get Eon Nyeon Yi to help him with his plan to break everyone out of jail (*brushes hair back* 'do you know what i feel like whenever i speak to you?' 'what?' *gives her a slow once-over. aborted finish to the attempted pick up line dies gasping like a fish in the back of his throat when she lights her cigarette* 'ani. never mind.') these people are making me look unhinged fr fr

[g4rchomp]

it's great to see students rise up against ties between universities and military corps, I hope it will also extend into a larger conversation about the lack of transparency behind financial "investments" in general, for citizens and businesses alike. banks and financial institutions need to become more transparent on where the money is going and allow ppl to really chose who they want to invest in

[pancakeke]

did etsy have an actual legal leg to stand on when they banned all Russian sellers or did they just not want to invest any time into understanding the impact of sanctions against Russia so they did a blanket ban to avoid getting into trouble.

[we-re-always-alright]

any time I see people tying minor world events to economics I’m like. that’s not how economics works. I know you want it to be how it works so you can blame someone. but that’s not how it works in any country or global economy.

[phantomrose96]

If anyone wants to know why every tech company in the world right now is clamoring for AI like drowned rats scrabbling to board a ship, I decided to make a post to explain what's happening.

(Disclaimer to start: I'm a software engineer who's been employed full time since 2018. I am not a historian nor an overconfident Youtube essayist, so this post is my working knowledge of what I see around me and the logical bridges between pieces.)

Okay anyway. The explanation starts further back than what's going on now. I'm gonna start with the year 2000. The Dot Com Bubble just spectacularly burst. The model of "we get the users first, we learn how to profit off them later" went out in a no-money-having bang (remember this, it will be relevant later). A lot of money was lost. A lot of people ended up out of a job. A lot of startup companies went under. Investors left with a sour taste in their mouth and, in general, investment in the internet stayed pretty cooled for that decade. This was, in my opinion, very good for the internet as it was an era not suffocating under the grip of mega-corporation oligarchs and was, instead, filled with Club Penguin and I Can Haz Cheezburger websites.

Then around the 2010-2012 years, a few things happened. Interest rates got low, and then lower. Facebook got huge. The iPhone took off. And suddenly there was a huge new potential market of internet users and phone-havers, and the cheap money was available to start backing new tech startup companies trying to hop on this opportunity. Companies like Uber, Netflix, and Amazon either started in this time, or hit their ramp-up in these years by shifting focus to the internet and apps.

Now, every start-up tech company dreaming of being the next big thing has one thing in common: they need to start off by getting themselves massively in debt. Because before you can turn a profit you need to first spend money on employees and spend money on equipment and spend money on data centers and spend money on advertising and spend money on scale and and and

But also, everyone wants to be on the ship for The Next Big Thing that takes off to the moon.

So there is a mutual interest between new tech companies, and venture capitalists who are willing to invest $$$ into said new tech companies. Because if the venture capitalists can identify a prize pig and get in early, that money could come back to them 100-fold or 1,000-fold. In fact it hardly matters if they invest in 10 or 20 total bust projects along the way to find that unicorn.

But also, becoming profitable takes time. And that might mean being in debt for a long long time before that rocket ship takes off to make everyone onboard a gazzilionaire.

But luckily, for tech startup bros and venture capitalists, being in debt in the 2010's was cheap, and it only got cheaper between 2010 and 2020. If people could secure loans for ~3% or 4% annual interest, well then a $100,000 loan only really costs $3,000 of interest a year to keep afloat. And if inflation is higher than that or at least similar, you're still beating the system.

So from 2010 through early 2022, times were good for tech companies. Startups could take off with massive growth, showing massive potential for something, and venture capitalists would throw infinite money at them in the hopes of pegging just one winner who will take off. And supporting the struggling investments or the long-haulers remained pretty cheap to keep funding.

You hear constantly about "Such and such app has 10-bazillion users gained over the last 10 years and has never once been profitable", yet the thing keeps chugging along because the investors backing it aren't stressed about the immediate future, and are still banking on that "eventually" when it learns how to really monetize its users and turn that profit.

The pandemic in 2020 took a magnifying-glass-in-the-sun effect to this, as EVERYTHING was forcibly turned online which pumped a ton of money and workers into tech investment. Simultaneously, money got really REALLY cheap, bottoming out with historic lows for interest rates.

Then the tide changed with the massive inflation that struck late 2021. Because this all-gas no-brakes state of things was also contributing to off-the-rails inflation (along with your standard-fare greedflation and price gouging, given the extremely convenient excuses of pandemic hardships and supply chain issues). The federal reserve whipped out interest rate hikes to try to curb this huge inflation, which is like a fire extinguisher dousing and suffocating your really-cool, actively-on-fire party where everyone else is burning but you're in the pool. And then they did this more, and then more. And the financial climate followed suit. And suddenly money was not cheap anymore, and new loans became expensive, because loans that used to compound at 2% a year are now compounding at 7 or 8% which, in the language of compounding, is a HUGE difference. A $100,000 loan at a 2% interest rate, if not repaid a single cent in 10 years, accrues to $121,899. A $100,000 loan at an 8% interest rate, if not repaid a single cent in 10 years, more than doubles to $215,892.

Now it is scary and risky to throw money at "could eventually be profitable" tech companies. Now investors are watching companies burn through their current funding and, when the companies come back asking for more, investors are tightening their coin purses instead. The bill is coming due. The free money is drying up and companies are under compounding pressure to produce a profit for their waiting investors who are now done waiting.

You get enshittification. You get quality going down and price going up. You get "now that you're a captive audience here, we're forcing ads or we're forcing subscriptions on you." Don't get me wrong, the plan was ALWAYS to monetize the users. It's just that it's come earlier than expected, with way more feet-to-the-fire than these companies were expecting. ESPECIALLY with Wall Street as the other factor in funding (public) companies, where Wall Street exhibits roughly the same temperament as a baby screaming crying upset that it's soiled its own diaper (maybe that's too mean a comparison to babies), and now companies are being put through the wringer for anything LESS than infinite growth that Wall Street demands of them.

Internal to the tech industry, you get MASSIVE wide-spread layoffs. You get an industry that used to be easy to land multiple job offers shriveling up and leaving recent graduates in a desperately awful situation where no company is hiring and the market is flooded with laid-off workers trying to get back on their feet.

Because those coin-purse-clutching investors DO love virtue-signaling efforts from companies that say "See! We're not being frivolous with your money! We only spend on the essentials." And this is true even for MASSIVE, PROFITABLE companies, because those companies' value is based on the Rich Person Feeling Graph (their stock) rather than the literal profit money. A company making a genuine gazillion dollars a year still tears through layoffs and freezes hiring and removes the free batteries from the printer room (totally not speaking from experience, surely) because the investors LOVE when you cut costs and take away employee perks. The "beer on tap, ping pong table in the common area" era of tech is drying up. And we're still unionless.

Never mind that last part.

And then in early 2023, AI (more specifically, Chat-GPT which is OpenAI's Large Language Model creation) tears its way into the tech scene with a meteor's amount of momentum. Here's Microsoft's prize pig, which it invested heavily in and is galivanting around the pig-show with, to the desperate jealousy and rapture of every other tech company and investor wishing it had that pig. And for the first time since the interest rate hikes, investors have dollar signs in their eyes, both venture capital and Wall Street alike. They're willing to restart the hose of money (even with the new risk) because this feels big enough for them to take the risk.

Now all these companies, who were in varying stages of sweating as their bill came due, or wringing their hands as their stock prices tanked, see a single glorious gold-plated rocket up out of here, the likes of which haven't been seen since the free money days. It's their ticket to buy time, and buy investors, and say "see THIS is what will wring money forth, finally, we promise, just let us show you."

To be clear, AI is NOT profitable yet. It's a money-sink. Perhaps a money-black-hole. But everyone in the space is so wowed by it that there is a wide-spread and powerful conviction that it will become profitable and earn its keep. (Let's be real, half of that profit "potential" is the promise of automating away jobs of pesky employees who peskily cost money.) It's a tech-space industrial revolution that will automate away skilled jobs, and getting in on the ground floor is the absolute best thing you can do to get your pie slice's worth.

It's the thing that will win investors back. It's the thing that will get the investment money coming in again (or, get it second-hand if the company can be the PROVIDER of something needed for AI, which other companies with venture-back will pay handsomely for). It's the thing companies are terrified of missing out on, lest it leave them utterly irrelevant in a future where not having AI-integration is like not having a mobile phone app for your company or not having a website.

So I guess to reiterate on my earlier point:

Drowned rats. Swimming to the one ship in sight.

[dashedwithromance]

everyone start praying for me i’m about to network with [redacted] and [redacted]. hope i don’t start biting

[stock-tips-india]

[loch-des-monster]

Day two of the week long strike for a free Palestine and I thought I’d share my recent painting with some tips for those looking for ways to get involved that can’t attend an in person event.

🍉Disrupt- Call/ email your representatives. Jam the phone lines with demands for an immediate ceasefire, aid to be allowed into Gaza, and an end to the occupation.

🍉With your money- do not spend this week. If you find yourself in dire need of something, try to buy it locally instead of from a corporation and absolutely no spending on non-necessities. Look into mutual aid programs near you. Beyond the strike, keep the boycotts going. Look for Palestinian businesses to support. Shop local over corporate as much as you can. Research your bank, see where they invest. If you find your money going to oppressors, move your money out of there and close the account. Send e-sims to Gaza. Look into Project Olive Branch.

🍉 Social Media: boost Palestinian voices and refrain from engaging with unrelated content. Share information. Engage with pro-Palestinian content to help fight the algorithms. This week, refuse to post or engage with any content that is not about Gaza.

Remember: these are just a few ways of getting involved if you can’t attend an in person event. You do not have to do all of them!!

Edit~ I’ve seen some truly disturbing reblogs to this painting and I just want to say that being anti-genocide should not be a controversial thing and if you feel it is, you’re on the wrong side of history. To all the lovely people just doing what you can to help, sending yall love!! I’m also just a person in a country whose reps are disappointing me greatly, looking for ways to be helpful.

[whaat-does-love-mean]

Honestly, what the fuck was the point in Microsoft even buying them and putting out a bullshit statement like, "acquiring Tango Gameworks marks the start if a great future for Xbox". What a load of crap. What was the point in Tango making an award winning quality level title in Hi-Fi Rush if it meant absolutely nothing in the end? Why would anyone want to start an indie company or make exciting new games if this is what happens to them for absolutely no reason?

This industry is on its knees.

Heartbreaking news this morning.